wyoming-parakeet-mlx/README.md

# wyoming-parakeet

A [Wyoming protocol](https://github.com/rhasspy/wyoming) speech-to-text server
for Home Assistant, backed by NVIDIA's
[Parakeet TDT](https://huggingface.co/nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2) running on
Apple Silicon via [parakeet-mlx](https://github.com/senstella/parakeet-mlx).

The model is loaded **in-process** — there is no HTTP hop between the Wyoming
bridge and inference.

## Why

On an M4 Mac mini, Parakeet transcribes a typical Home Assistant command in
**~100 ms** — roughly 5× faster than the best whisper.cpp configuration and
9× faster than whisper `large-v3`, while matching them on accuracy. See
[Benchmarks](#benchmarks) for the full comparison against eleven other
backends.

Two things matter beyond raw speed:

- **Silence returns an empty string.** Every whisper variant tested
  hallucinates on digital silence (`"Thank you."`, or `"you"` for
  faster-whisper), which reaches your conversation agent as a real utterance.
  Parakeet and Moonshine return nothing.
- **No cross-request contamination.** whisper.cpp's server carries decoder
  context between requests unless you pass `-nc`, and will return the
  *previous* utterance — in testing, roughly one time in five.

## Benchmarks

All figures measured on one machine: **M4 Mac mini (10-core, 32 GB), macOS 26.5**.
48 clips — 16 Home Assistant commands rendered through three macOS TTS voices
(Daniel, Samantha, Karen). Every backend loads once, transcribes all 48 clips
to warm up, then runs a timed pass. Latency is the **median** of that pass;
means are skewed by first-request kernel compilation.

Every row is reproducible — see [Reproducing](#reproducing) below.

| Backend | Runtime | Median | p90 | Exact | Digits | Silence |
|---|---|--:|--:|--:|--:|---|
| moonshine tiny | ONNX CPU | 28 ms | 44 ms | 31/48 | 15/21 | `""` |
| moonshine base | ONNX CPU | 53 ms | 70 ms | 35/48 | 20/21 | `""` |
| **parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2** | **MLX** | **102 ms** | **112 ms** | **46/48** | **21/21** | `""` |
| parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v3 | MLX | 128 ms | 149 ms | 36/48 | 10/21 | `""` |
| faster-whisper tiny.en | CPU int8 | 182 ms | 204 ms | 44/48 | 21/21 | `"you"` |
| faster-whisper base.en | CPU int8 | 326 ms | 347 ms | 44/48 | 19/21 | `"you"` |
| whisper.cpp large-v3-turbo | Metal + CoreML | 518 ms | 537 ms | 47/48 | 21/21 | `"thank you"` |
| mlx-whisper large-v3-turbo | MLX | 828 ms | 848 ms | 47/48 | 21/21 | `"thank you"` |
| whisper.cpp large-v3 | Metal + CoreML | 941 ms | 1042 ms | 47/48 | 21/21 | `"thank you"` |
| faster-whisper small.en | CPU int8 | 974 ms | 1032 ms | 47/48 | 21/21 | `"you"` |
| mlx-whisper large-v3 | MLX | 1170 ms | 1251 ms | 48/48 | 21/21 | `"thank you"` |
| faster-whisper distil-large-v3 | CPU int8 | 4269 ms | 4304 ms | 46/48 | 21/21 | `"thank you"` |

**Exact** is a strict string match after normalising case, punctuation and
whitespace. **Digits** counts how many of the 21 number-bearing clips came
back with digits rather than spelled-out words — see
[Model choice](#model-choice-v2-not-v3) for why that matters more than it looks.
**Silence** is the output for three seconds of digital silence.

What the numbers say:

- **Parakeet v2 has the best latency/accuracy trade-off here.** It is 5×
  faster than the best whisper.cpp configuration and lands within one clip of
  it on accuracy.
- **`mlx-whisper large-v3` is the accuracy ceiling** — the only backend to
  score 48/48 — but costs 11× the latency to get there.
- **Moonshine is genuinely faster**, at 2× Parakeet's speed, and it also
  handles silence cleanly. It gives up real accuracy for it (35/48), so it is
  the right pick only if latency dominates everything else.
- **Parakeet v3's 10/21 on digits** is the ITN problem quantified. Its exact
  match (36/48) is dragged down almost entirely by that one behaviour.
- Both clips Parakeet v2 misses are the same word — "aircon", which the TTS
  voices render as "air con" / "aircan". Accuracy differences at the top of
  this table are concentrated in a couple of awkward tokens, not spread out.

### Caveats — read these before trusting the table

- **This is not a WER benchmark.** The audio is clean synthetic TTS from three
  similar English voices, with no noise, accents, crosstalk or far-field
  effects. It measures latency rigorously and accuracy only as a domain smoke
  test. For real word error rates see the
  [Open ASR Leaderboard](https://huggingface.co/spaces/hf-audio/open_asr_leaderboard).
- **faster-whisper is CPU-only on Apple Silicon.** CTranslate2 has no Metal
  backend, so those rows show CPU int8 performance. On an NVIDIA GPU they
  would look completely different — do not read this as a verdict on
  faster-whisper generally, only on what it does on this hardware.
- **Latency is raw inference**, excluding Wyoming protocol overhead. End to
  end through this server, expect roughly 15–35 ms on top.
- One machine, one run each. Treat differences of a few percent as noise.

### Reproducing

**1. Set up a throwaway venv.** Keep the benchmark dependencies out of the
service venv — they pull in CTranslate2, ONNX Runtime and a second copy of
MLX, none of which the server needs:

```bash
python3.13 -m venv /tmp/bench-venv          # same requirement as install.sh:
/tmp/bench-venv/bin/pip install -r bench/requirements.txt
```

Use an explicit interpreter, not bare `python3` — on macOS that is still the
system Python 3.9, which has no MLX wheels and fails with
`No matching distribution found for parakeet-mlx`. Homebrew's
`python3.11`/`3.12`/`3.13`/`3.14` all work.

**2. Render the clips** (macOS only — it uses the built-in `say` voices):

```bash
./bench/make_clips.sh
```

Writes 49 files to `bench/clips/` (16 phrases × 3 voices, plus silence). They
are gitignored; regenerating them is deterministic for a given macOS release,
but voice quality does change between releases, so numbers are only strictly
comparable within one machine.

**3. Run a backend.** The `--backend` argument is `kind:model`:

```bash
/tmp/bench-venv/bin/python bench/benchmark.py \
    --backend parakeet:mlx-community/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2
```

Add `--json` for a single machine-readable line instead of the human report,
and `--label` to control the name in the output. Without `--json` it also
prints every mismatch with expected-vs-actual, which is the useful bit when a
model scores worse than you expected.

If you have `HF_HUB_OFFLINE=1` exported (the service sets it), prefix the
command with `HF_HUB_OFFLINE=` so it can fetch models it has not seen.

**The exact commands behind each table row:**

| Row | Command |
|---|---|
| moonshine tiny | `--backend moonshine:moonshine/tiny` |
| moonshine base | `--backend moonshine:moonshine/base` |
| parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2 | `--backend parakeet:mlx-community/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2` |
| parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v3 | `--backend parakeet:mlx-community/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v3` |
| faster-whisper tiny.en | `--backend faster-whisper:tiny.en` |
| faster-whisper base.en | `--backend faster-whisper:base.en` |
| faster-whisper small.en | `--backend faster-whisper:small.en` |
| faster-whisper distil-large-v3 | `--backend faster-whisper:distil-large-v3` |
| mlx-whisper large-v3-turbo | `--backend mlx-whisper:mlx-community/whisper-large-v3-turbo` |
| mlx-whisper large-v3 | `--backend mlx-whisper:mlx-community/whisper-large-v3-mlx` |
| whisper.cpp \* | `--backend whispercpp:http://127.0.0.1:8920/inference` |

\* The whisper.cpp rows need a server running first. That requires your own
[whisper.cpp](https://github.com/ggml-org/whisper.cpp) build — ideally with
`-DWHISPER_COREML=1` for the CoreML encoder, which is what the table
measured:

```bash
./build/bin/whisper-server -m models/ggml-large-v3-turbo.bin \
    --host 127.0.0.1 --port 8920 -nc -sns -l en -t 4
```

`-nc` matters. Without it the server carries decoder context between requests
and periodically returns the previous utterance, which would make whisper.cpp
look far worse than it is. The table gives it its best configuration
deliberately.

**Cost.** The full sweep is roughly 15 minutes of compute, dominated by
`distil-large-v3` at ~4.3 s per clip, plus however long it takes to pull about
7 GB of models. To clean up afterwards:

```bash
rm -rf /tmp/bench-venv bench/clips
rm -rf ~/.cache/huggingface/hub/models--mlx-community--whisper-large-v3*
rm -rf ~/.cache/huggingface/hub/models--Systran--faster-*
rm -rf ~/.cache/huggingface/hub/models--UsefulSensors--moonshine*
```

## Requirements

- Apple Silicon Mac (MLX is Metal/ANE-backed)
- Python 3.10+ **with the `lzma` module** — `librosa` pulls in `pooch`, which
  imports it. Pythons built without `xz` (a common pyenv default) pass every
  version check and then fail at import time with
  `ModuleNotFoundError: _lzma`. Homebrew's Python is fine.
- ~2.3 GB disk for the model, ~600 MB for MLX wheels

`ffmpeg` is **not** required — Wyoming already delivers 16 kHz mono PCM, so
the mel spectrogram is built directly.

## Install

```bash
git clone https://github.com/adamhf/wyoming-parakeet-mlx
cd wyoming-parakeet-mlx
./install.sh
```

This creates a virtualenv, runs the unit tests, pre-downloads the model, and
registers a LaunchDaemon on port 7892 that starts at boot without needing a
GUI login. It installs *in place*, so keep the checkout somewhere permanent.

Options: `--port`, `--model`, `--user`, `--python`, `--no-daemon`,
`--no-download`.

Then in Home Assistant: **Settings → Devices & Services → Add Integration →
Wyoming Protocol**, enter the host and port, and select the new engine as the
speech-to-text step of your Assist pipeline.

Remove it with `./uninstall.sh`.

## Model choice: v2, not v3

The default is `parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2` even though v3 is newer and
multilingual, because of inverse text normalisation:

| Spoken | v2 | v3 |
|---|---|---|
| "twenty one degrees" | `21 degrees` | `twenty-one degrees` |
| "thirty percent" | `30%` | `thirty percent` |

Home Assistant's local intent matching (hassil) expects digits. If your
pipeline has `prefer_local_intents` enabled, a model that spells numbers out
still *looks* accurate while quietly pushing commands off the fast local path
onto your LLM fallback.

Measured on the benchmark corpus, v3 returned digits for only **10 of 21**
number-bearing commands, against **21/21** for v2. That single behaviour is
most of the gap between their exact-match scores. v3 remains the right choice
if you need languages other than English — just size the trade-off first.

## Updating the model

`HF_HUB_OFFLINE=1` is set in the daemon, so it never silently re-downloads or
changes model at boot, and starts fine without a network. Updating is
therefore deliberate:

```bash
HF_HUB_OFFLINE= .venv/bin/python -c \
  "from parakeet_mlx import from_pretrained; from_pretrained('mlx-community/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v3')"
```

Then re-run `./install.sh --model mlx-community/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v3`. The old
model stays cached, so reverting is just another `./install.sh`.

## Tests

```bash
.venv/bin/python -m pytest
```

37 unit tests, well under a second. The model is mocked throughout, so they
need no GPU, no network and no 2.3 GB download — they cover the audio
marshalling and threading around it, which is where the real bugs were. Every
regression test was mutation-checked: the fix reverted, the test confirmed to
fail.

Worth knowing about a few:

- `test_load_and_inference_share_one_thread` — MLX streams are thread-local,
  so the model must be loaded *and* evaluated on the same thread or `mx.eval()`
  raises `There is no Stream(cpu, 1) in current thread`. The test deliberately
  *overlaps* its calls: sequential calls can coincidentally reuse one thread
  out of a multi-worker pool and pass a broken implementation.
- `test_audio_is_float32_not_bfloat16` — `get_logmel` views the complex STFT
  output as the input dtype, so anything narrower silently doubles the mel bin
  count and the matmul fails.
- `test_model_failure_still_sends_a_transcript` — Wyoming's run loop is
  `try/finally` with no `except`, so an exception escaping `handle_event`
  closes the connection having sent nothing, and Home Assistant waits for a
  response that never arrives. The handler catches and returns an empty
  transcript so it fails fast instead.
- `test_concurrent_handlers_do_not_share_audio` — guards against
  reintroducing the cross-request contamination described above.

### End to end

Unit tests never touch the real model, so after any model or library change:

```bash
./test/make-clips.sh                                    # generates via macOS TTS
.venv/bin/python test/wy-test.py test/clips/*.wav
```

Expect all ten commands correct, `silence.wav` empty, ~100–150 ms each once
warm. The first request or two after a restart run slower (~200–350 ms) while
Metal compiles its kernels. **Check number formatting, not just the words** —
`cmd2`, `cmd4` and `cmd7` are the ones that catch a model with weak ITN.

## Updating the library

```bash
.venv/bin/pip install -U parakeet-mlx mlx mlx-metal wyoming
```

Re-run both test suites afterwards. This project calls `get_logmel()` directly
rather than `load_audio()` (which shells out to ffmpeg), so it depends on two
parakeet-mlx internals rather than public API — the tests above are what tell
you if either moved.

## Logs

```bash
tail -f /tmp/local.wyoming-parakeet.stderr
```

Each request logs audio duration, inference time and the transcript.

## Security

**The Wyoming protocol has no authentication or transport encryption.** Any
client that can reach the port can submit audio, and Home Assistant trusts
whatever this service returns — a transcript becomes an intent, and an intent
unlocks doors. Treat the port as a trust boundary and keep it on a network you
control.

Two things this server does about that:

- **Buffered audio is capped** (`--max-audio-seconds`, default 120). Audio
  accumulates until `AudioStop`, and a client that never sends one — malicious
  or just stuck — otherwise grows the buffer indefinitely. Measured at ~11 MB/s
  over loopback, enough to exhaust 32 GB in under an hour from one connection.
  Over the cap, further audio is dropped with a single warning and whatever was
  captured is still transcribed.
- **Transcripts are not logged at INFO.** The log records duration, latency and
  character count; the text itself is behind `--debug`. Log files are
  long-lived, and on macOS `/tmp` they are world-readable by default — meaning
  every voice command would otherwise sit in plaintext readable by any local
  account.

Worth doing yourself, depending on your threat model:

- **Bind to one interface.** The daemon listens on `0.0.0.0`, so it is exposed
  on every network the host is attached to — including VPN interfaces like
  Tailscale, which is easy to overlook. Set the URI to a specific address
  (`--uri tcp://192.168.1.10:7892`) or firewall the port to your Home
  Assistant host.
- **Do not run it as an admin account.** The installer defaults `--user` to
  whoever runs it. On a typical macOS setup that account is in `admin`, and if
  `%admin` has a `NOPASSWD` sudo rule then a compromise of this service is a
  direct path to root. A dedicated non-admin service account costs nothing.
- **Pin your dependencies** if you care about supply chain. `requirements.txt`
  is deliberately loose so `install.sh` picks up fixes; pin exact versions (and
  ideally hashes) if you would rather audit upgrades. Model weights are
  `safetensors`, so loading them does not execute code, but the initial
  download from HuggingFace is trust-on-first-use — pin a revision if that
  matters to you. `HF_HUB_OFFLINE=1` in the daemon means it never re-fetches
  after that point.

## License

MIT